NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 2012 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite (on higher end hardware at least).
Unfortunately for NVIDIA they’re in a bit of a bind with Shogun 2. The March 22nd patch effectively broke Kepler performance under certain situations. GTX 680 performance has been nearly halved due to that patch; what was 33fps at 2560 is now 18fps. As near as we can tell this is a problem with the game – Shogun 2 wouldn’t know what the GTX 680 is and suddenly doesn’t know what to do with it – but the end result is that GTX 680/690 users are in trouble here.
As it stands 2560 is utterly broken – perhaps due to MSAA or shadowing – but our results at 5760 and 1920, which use the Very High profile, have not dropped due to the patch and as aresult we have at least some confidence in them. To that end while NVIDIA’s multi-GPU scaling is quite good at 5760 at 95%, not only does AMD have a lead over the GTX 680 with a single 7970, but Crossfire scaling is nearly perfect. Furthermore the GTX 690 once more has trouble boosting here, leading to a 7% deficit compared to the GTX 680 SLI. As a result the GTX 690 only reaches 85% of the performance of the 7970CF here. Things look better at 1920, but besides being a rather low resolution for the GTX 690 we’re also CPU limited by that point.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Correct, we're using the Steam version. I reloaded it as of last week.bpwnes - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
...but will it blend?Luscious - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I'll take three, thanks!!!tipoo - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Send me 10 grand and I'll send you three of the nitrogen enriched versions.Makaveli - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Is this a review for the 7970 CF or 690 lolFor a $1000 card that is not a very good showing. i'm thinking that 2GB limit per gpu is really starting to hurt them not to mention the 256bit memory bus.
shin0bi272 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
That's what I was thinking. Imagine what they could have done if they'd of expanded the bus to 384bit per gpu... such a sad showing.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
There are plenty of 4BG 680 reviews out there that certainly disprove your thinking, and lack of knowledge.silverblue - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
This card has 2GB per GPU, not 4. Also, the lack of memory (!) will limit performance before the memory bus does. Compared to previous NVIDIA products, the 680 has far faster memory which mitigates having a narrower bus.shin0bi272 - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
I guess we'll see when the gk110 arrives this summerCeriseCogburn - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
There is no limit with the 2G of memory, but none of you have looked at teh dozens of reviews and hundreds of blogs proofs, so you will keep babbling stupid things, forever, it appears.